Adam Riess discovered that the universe was expanding
faster and faster, thanks to a repulsive force dubbed "dark
energy" — a breakthrough that has led scientists to
reconsider the fundamentals of physics.

There are
billions of galaxies, a zillion stars, swirling clouds of
dust, and bulging pockets of gas. Cosmic radio waves fan
out around something called "dark matter" — "dark"
because no one really knows what it is — while
remnants of energy that date back to the Big Bang 14
billion years ago swell and contract. Stars eat up other
ones, then implode. Asteroids and comets wreak their usual
havoc.

Don't let the perspective and calm of a clear night sky
fool you: The universe is a mess.

Astrophysicists, cosmologists, theorists, and other Big
Thinkers intimately understand this. It's a lot to clean
up, intellectually speaking. They will tell you that the
whole shebang is up for grabs, that theories of its
vastness and mechanics are constantly in flux, falling in
and out of fashion almost as rapidly as amateur television
singers. And the conjecture is seemingly as infinite as
space itself.

One pair of astrophysicists in England believes, for
example, that the universe is part of a series of Big
Bangs, the result of an extra cosmic dimension or two.
Others contend that the universe is being pulled apart by
the gravity from surrounding, er, universes. And one
well-published physicist has thrown his epistemological
hands into the air, arguing that scientists practice a
belief system bordering on religion, an overzealous "faith"
in the idea that the universe can be explained in rational
terms.

You can see the dilemma. Stabs at making sense of the
universe can jab out in a million directions and,
sometimes, make people crazy. To carve a slice out of The
Problem of the Universe, an astrophysicist would have to
make an extraordinary claim, one that requires, as the late
astronomer Carl Sagan would say, extraordinary evidence to
make it believable.

So in 1998, when a group of 19 carbon-based life forms on a
planet in the Milky Way galaxy discovered a new kind of
force in the universe — one that pushes it outward in
all directions at an ever-faster clip — the world of
science stood up and took notice. At the group's center was
a Harvard postdoc who boiled down a mass of hand-scrawled
data and came up with the calculations that would reverse
the orbit of astrophysical thinking.

Adam Riess found "dark energy," the anti-gravitational
force that makes up nearly three-quarters of the universe
and causes it to expand at an accelerated rate. His team
had mathematically digested information from telescope
images of distant exploding stars (supernovae) to measure
the age and mass of the universe. His work on supernovae
led Riess to conclude that the laws then believed to be
governing the movement of the cosmos were dead wrong. He
had just turned 28.

Now a professor of
physics and astronomy at Johns Hopkins' Krieger School
of Arts and Sciences, Riess compares dark energy to the
effect one would observe as a raisin amid a baking loaf of
raisin bread — a loaf made with all the yeast ever
grown. "All the other raisins — other galaxies
— rush away from us," he says. "You might expect it
to keep expanding at a certain rate. But what we found was
the loaf is getting bigger and bigger at an ever-greater
speed."

The discovery fills a void in scientific thinking. "It's
central," says Riess. "Dark energy is most of the universe
and we don't understand it. It's like an auto mechanic who
says he knows cars but hasn't worked on 75 percent of
one."

Noted scientists with longer track records also marvel at
the momentousness of the dark energy discovery, which they
compare to astronomer Edwin Hubble's observation, made 80
years ago, that the universe was expanding. Riess' methods
accounted for so-called nuisance factors having to do with
the effect of dust particles on light from fading
supernovae, allowing scientists to measure their distance
from Earth accurately enough to conclude that the universe
was speeding up.

Scientists had long been aware of dark matter —
unseen particles that make up about 22 percent of the mass
of the universe. But the rest of it had been a mystery.
Dark energy is "the missing piece, the one that makes the
rest of cosmology make sense," says Michael Turner,
professor of physics, astronomy, and astrophysics at the
University of Chicago. Turner is also the man who provided
the admixture of public relations and science that coined
the term "dark energy." (The moniker makes it easier for
scientists to concisely reference it in their publications,
he notes, plus the energy doesn't contain light or
particles. "You have to have a catchy name, one that people
will like," he adds.)

Dark energy could provide clues as to how the universe was
formed or whether there is some kind of mixture of space
and time that astrophysicists, caught without the benefit
of a unifying "theory of everything," have overlooked or
misunderstood. "We had considered other things, but they
didn't add up," Turner adds. "Dark energy explained the 70
percent or so of the universe that we couldn't factor in
when we added up all of its mass. This could be a clue that
leads to a new theory of gravity, or the first detection of
an extra dimension in space. It's a big, big, big deal."

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration agrees.
At the urging of the National Academies, an association of
scientists that helps set the agenda for future research,
NASA has made dark energy its top research priority and
plans to commit around $1 billion to develop space
telescopes for investigations into its nature. Three
laboratories, including one led by Charles L. Bennett, also
a Krieger School professor of physics and astronomy, are
competing for the cash and the glory of finding answers to
the cosmos' most vital mystery. A "winner" will likely be
named later this year. If Bennett's bid is successful,
Riess will be part of his team, searching for 1,000 or more
supernovae that could provide clues as to how dark energy
works.

"Dark energy is most of the universe and we don't
understand it. It's like an auto mechanic who says he knows
cars but hasn't worked on 75 percent of
one."

The project isn't all that's at stake for Riess, colleagues
and observers whisper. He's been a winner or co-winner of a
heaping handful of top-drawer international science awards
since 1999, had his dark energy observations touted as one
of the major discoveries of the 20th century, and seen some
of the papers he has written since then become among the
most-cited in his field.

But Riess isn't the only one claiming the dark energy
discovery. Saul Perlmutter, a physics professor at
University of California, Berkeley and head of the
Supernova Acceleration Probe at its federally supported
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, is one of the
project leaders competing with Bennett's telescope
proposal. Media reports cited Perlmutter as heading a team
that announced — a few weeks earlier than Riess'
group did — its observations of conditions supporting
the existence of dark energy. And academics from both sides
have shaken the hive, all saying they want to set the
record straight — but perhaps hoping as well to have
an effect on who gets the highest accolade a scientist can
receive, the Nobel.

"There's this prize that some committee gives out in Sweden
each year that might have something to do with it,"says
Turner, who has connections to both sides: He is a member
of Perlmutter's team and has co-authored papers with
Riess.

In the middle of it all is Riess, who prefers to paint
himself as he is: a coin-collecting, football-loving family
man who believes deeply in science and who has no time or
interest in such foolishness. Turner says Riess has
"admirably" stayed out of the skirmish, concentrating
instead on the science and transcending the hubbub
surrounding the discovery of dark energy, the credit for
which he is more than willing to share. There's no room for
egos in science, Riess offers.

"What's important is you have two different teams that got
the same result. That's good for science and for everyone
else," Riess adds.

But upon meeting a reporter one day for lunch, Riess
pulsates with anger at another scribe in London who is
writing a story that tilts definitively — and
unfairly, he says — to the side of Perlmutter. Some
awards committees have made the same mistake, other
physicists point out.

Riess is a reasonable guy. He really doesn't want it to
get to him. But it does.

The front
door of Office 207 at Johns Hopkins' Bloomberg Center for
Physics and Astronomy is adorned with a copied photo of
Riess' 3-year-old daughter, Gabrielle, holding open a book
featuring a famous image of Albert Einstein. Both have
their tongues out. Inside, the walls hold little more than
several framed awards and provide a leaning spot for a
10-foot-high bookshelf lined with hardback tomes as weighty
in mass as they are in subject matter.

At the room's center is a simple wood desk topped by an
Apple computer with a 30-inch monitor. This is the entirety
of the Riess lab.

He is the ultimate low-maintenance researcher, say his
colleagues. His surroundings mirror that, as does his
nondescript, office-Joe uniform: a blue Oxford shirt, green
pants, gumsoled brown leather shoes. His round face sports
a simple square goatee. Atop the brain that figured out
what nearly three-quarters of the universe is made of sits
a bristle of brown hair encircling an emerging Friar Tuck's
bald spot.

Playing against type comes naturally to Riess. Images of
the lone astronomer shuddering against the cold as he
searches the heavens via a mountaintop telescope don't
apply. Riess admits he wouldn't know most constellations if
the stars fell on him. His hands may tremble occasionally
— not from the cold, but from energy and excitement,
especially when he tells of something he's learned. His
colleagues marvel at Riess' ability to convey rich and
ponderous concepts to the laity. He'll pepper his
explanations with analogies and references to Akira
Kurosawa films, an ancient tale from India, or football.
That talent isn't wasted at the Krieger School: Every other
year, he teaches a course called Great Discoveries in
Astronomy and Astrophysics to non-majors.

"It's something I really enjoy doing," he says. The text he
uses includes a final chapter on his work and dark energy.
"It kind of gives people the idea that there's more to this
astrophysics stuff than old men and telescopes."

Instead of making observations with a ground-based
telescope, his stargazing tool of choice is the computer,
its oversized screen serving as his window to the universe.
Using wide-angle images — or "tiles" — taken by
the Hubble Space
Telescope, Riess has spent one-third of his working
time in recent years chasing the past, searching for stars
that crashed and burned billions of years ago.

Riess traces the light of ancient and intact stars, but
only as comparison points for supernovae. When a star
explodes and dies, it creates an incredibly bright flash of
light — equal to 4 billion suns. But unlike
neighboring stars that shine all year, supernovae only
remain prominent in the telescopic sky for a month before
disintegrating, making rapid identification and calibration
paramount.

It isn't easy. The tiles resemble a splattering of whiteout
on black construction paper — random, melded
together, seemingly impenetrable. Riess' mind penetrates
them, sometimes with the help of a postdoc or the two
graduate students in his charge. He analyzes these images
for changes in a patch of sky, searching for a new
exploding star. "It would look to the layperson exactly
like a TV channel with pure static, except, once in a lucky
while, there will be a collusion of a dozen white pixels
that join together in a round blob," he explains.

Physicists since the 1930s have known that supernovae of a
certain type could be useful for measuring the depths of
the universe, but they lacked the technology to do it. They
can calculate expanses in space using the speed of light,
which will also peg the age of bodies in space and,
ultimately, the universe. But telescopes with the strength
necessary to track down the exploding stars took decades to
develop.

During the 1990s, once technology started catching up with
the desire to scan the most distant parts of the universe,
supernovae became the yardstick of choice for
astrophysicists. Riess latched on to the fleeting bodies
partly by luck. Indeed, supernovae and serendipity have
played the major roles in his (pardon the phrase) stellar
career.

After graduating with a degree in physics from the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1992, Riess began
working toward a PhD at Harvard. Early on, he was
bewildered as to what his area of focus would be. He toyed
with the idea of studying "SETI" — the search for
extraterrestrial intelligence — a subject that
resonated with a guy who wrote space-based sci-fi stories
in his spare time. But his older sister and her husband
talked him out of it. He'd be a student forever, they told
him, because he wouldn't have any data to clinch his
dissertation. He decided to survey the terrestrial
intelligence at Harvard for answers.

"I asked a bunch of professors what I should do," Riess
remembers. "I knew next to nothing about astronomy or
astrophysics. But I was intrigued with ideas like, How will
the universe end? and, How long has it been here? These
were the big questions. What I was amazed to find was that
this wasn't just a subject for speculation. You could go
out with a telescope and answer them. It may be difficult,
but there's a methodology."

He took up with Robert Kirshner, a Harvard physics
professor who had developed an international reputation in
supernovae research. Riess, always an excellent student in
the sciences and everything else, had long been attracted
to those bigger questions because of an innate discomfort
with not understanding how things work. "I've always had to
know what makes things go," he says.

The son of a psychologist mom and an
engineer-turned-entrepreneur dad, Riess was raised by
egalitarians who encouraged him to follow his insatiable
inquisitiveness, but never pushed him. The youngest of
three siblings, young Adam was a pleasant kid who was
nonetheless daring and creative, his mother, Doris Riess,
says.

Those who grew up with him remember a sports freak, one who
wasn't satisfied with playing by the official rules. The
family's white house on an exurban hill in Warren, New
Jersey, often served as a backdrop for wild games that
ended in injuries, if not mayhem. "We'd never play the game
the way you were supposed to play it," says Chris Kratt,
Riess' closest childhood friend. "It wasn't just about
getting the most baskets. You had to dribble three times
around his mom's car, then run up the street and back
backwards. It was crazy stuff."

Adam played organized sports as well, especially soccer.
His mother remembers him as the small kid who would erupt
out of a pile of players with the ball and head toward the
goal. "You got the feeling he understood the game more
deeply than the other kids," says Doris Riess.

Adam also showed a deep and early understanding of science
and history, from dinosaurs to the Civil War and beyond.
His interest in the past would continue to drive his
curiosity at college. He would minor in history at MIT,
writing a final research paper on baseball's 1919 "Black
Sox" scandal. He investigated whether the Chicago White
Sox's effort to throw the World Series that year could be
deduced from news reports and box score statistics. (The
answer: It couldn't.)

Early on, he and his dad would look up at the sky to ponder
a thunderstorm or a black blanket dotted with planets,
stars, and the occasional comet. Michael Riess told his son
that the light he was seeing from stars is millions of
years old, and that a star or two he was viewing may no
longer exist. Adam's mind was blown.

The rest of Riess' early life reads like yet another
smart-kid-as-supergeek story: At 8, he and a sister built a
tree-house and outfitted it with a basement and a working
telegraph line; in second grade, he gave a talk to a
fifth-grade class on the workings of the stock market; at
11, he was giving orders to his Radio Shack computer and,
at 13, teaching an adult class in programming.

With his budding-scientist's bona fides piling up, young
Adam could get away with being proud, but Riess
mére et pére wouldn't stand for
arrogance or entitlement. His parents valued education but
tutted and tsk-ed discretely at neighbors who paid their
children $100 for A's or forced them to take advanced
courses. High intelligence and membership in an upper
economic class didn't excuse their children from behaving
with equanimity and compassion to other humans, or absolve
them from tedium, the Riesses reasoned.

When the Riess kids were growing up, they worked at the New
York-style deli run by their father. One day, Michael Riess
asked his son to clean up after a customer had gotten sick
in the bathroom. Adam didn't want to do it.

"He lit into me later about that," Riess says. "He told me,
'You have to do what you have to do. You think you're
better than everyone else there?' He let me know that there
were people who had to do that kind of work for a living.
What I took from all that was that I had to really work
hard to do the things I like. I was terrified of having to
do something where I would just watch the clock."

At Harvard,
Kirshner recognized that Riess was the kind of kid who was
on his way to somewhere. He was imaginative. When he taught
a class, Riess would stage a Jeopardy!-style game
show to get his students thinking. "He had that
self-starting quality you see in good graduate students
— the ones who become successful scientists,"
Kirshner says.

At the time, supernovae were being found more rapidly than
ever by Perlmutter's team at the Berkeley Lab. But Kirshner
wanted to measure the distance of supernovae more precisely
than they had. To do that, someone would need to come up
with a mathematical model to determine which supernovae
appeared dim because they were distant and which were dim
because intervening dust particles made them look that way,
making their distance difficult to quantify. That someone
was Riess, who developed a method that would —
eventually with a 99.7 percent level of certainty —
account for dust and the variations in supernovae light
caused by gravity-created curvatures.

Computations showed there wasn't enough mass or gravity
to add up to deceleration. The universe had to be speeding
up. "Your first reaction is, 'I screwed something
up.'"

The technique earned Riess a PhD in 1996, after only four
years instead of the usual five. More importantly, it would
prove crucial for scientists who wanted to use supernovae
as regularly reliable universe-calibrating tools. Within a
year, Riess would turn down a fellowship offer from
Perlmutter and take another one based at Berkeley.
Eventually, he would sign on with the High-Z Supernova
Search Team, the band of astrophysicists working in
Australia, Chile, England, Germany, and elsewhere that
Kirshner began to assemble around 1993. ("High-Z" refers to
"redshift," the symbol of measurement named after the tint
we see in very distant bodies in space.)

Brian Schmidt, the Australian elected as the team's
principal investigator, needed someone to analyze data for
a project called "Measuring the Cosmic Deceleration
and Global Geometry of the Universe with Type Ia
Supernovae" (italics added). Riess was drafted for the job.
He was hardly ecstatic. The research team already knew what
it was going to find — that universal expansion was
slowing down — and the project was chock-full of
mathematical tedium. Riess wasn't sure he wanted to waste
his time.

"Here I was working on this prestigious fellowship where I
could go totally in my own direction," he says. "I had
three years to make my mark, to prove that I was worthy of
a job in this field. And this would take one year. There
was no glamour in this, I thought."

No matter, he hunkered down to work like a monk in a tiny
office at Berkeley, 200 yards down the hill from
Perlmutter's team. There, he and another postdoc locked
into their computers while listening to rock on the radio,
taking particular delight when a song title or band name,
such as Semisonic, let them know that pop culture hadn't
totally written off science geeks as irrelevant. They'd get
particularly excited when they heard a song called
"Champagne Supernova," by Oasis, a band that once
haphazardly referenced Isaac Newton by naming a CD
Standing on the Shoulder of Giants.

While a
longtime fan and student of Einstein's work, Riess hadn't
thought more than a day in his life about one of the more
obscure concepts included in his theory of general
relativity: the "cosmological constant," a mathematical
construct that posited a vacuum energy working against
gravity to keep the universe static. In fact, Einstein had
shelved the cosmological constant a decade after inventing
it — calling it a "blunder" — upon hearing of
Hubble's findings that the universe was expanding and not
static, as he had assumed. By the middle of 1997, when
Perlmutter's team measured supernovae and found the
universe to be decelerating, all signs pointed to a slowing
universe — not to one speeding up under the influence
of an obscure kind of energy.

But soon Riess and the High-Z team would stand on
Einstein's shoulders. In fall of 1997, Riess began to
notice that his measurements weren't adding up. He asked
his computer to calculate the total mass of the universe.
Totally unexpectedly, he got a number with a negative sign.
The implications of that sign would contradict scientific
orthodoxy. As time moves the universe further away from the
violent outburst of the Big Bang, the conventional wisdom
went, the soup of particles it created would decelerate,
giving them a chance to form structures — moons,
planets, stars, etc. — with the help of gravity.
Theorists wondered whether the universe, tens of billions
of years later, would end in a "Big Crunch," when all
matter, drawn together by gravity, would implode.

But Riess' computations of supernovae distances showed that
there wasn't enough mass or gravity to add up to
deceleration. The universe had to be speeding up. All of
which meant, Riess thought at the time, that his results
were wrong. "Your first reaction is, 'I screwed something
up,'" he says.

Only one other member of the High-Z team was on site,
Berkeley astronomy professor Alex Filippenko, who had
switched from Perlmutter's team, led by hierarchically
minded particle physicists, for the High-Z team's group
rule. Riess pumped him for help.

"We had an idea that the [Perlmutter] team was getting the
same results as we were," Filippenko says. "Adam was always
concerned with what might be going wrong and what might be
fooling us. One of the reasons he joined the High-Z team
was that we dealt with the subtleties, the nuisance factors
involved."

The nuisance factors had themselves become a nuisance,
Riess recalls. After spending nearly all of 1997 trying to
mathematically deal with them, he summoned Schmidt, the
principal investigator, for help at the end of the year.
Schmidt added up the data and came to the same conclusion:
The cosmological constant, or some variation on its theme,
was back on the astrophysical table.

"This thing called science is somehow the fabric of the
universe. It's the most egalitarian enterprise I know of.
It speaks to everybody in the same way."

As Riess and Schmidt e-mailed back and forth to each other
in early 1998, they were hardly confident in their
findings. They signed their e-missives "Pons" and
"Fleischmann" — tongue-in-cheek references to Stanley
Pons and Martin Fleischmann, the two University of Utah
electrochemists who made a big splash with the "discovery"
of cold fusion in 1989, an idea soon refuted by others. "We
didn't want dark energy to be the next cold fusion," says
Riess.

Despite the self-doubt, Riess and Schmidt started talking
about getting their ideas out to the public, possibly with
a press release announcing their findings. That was right
around the time when Perlmutter told a group of astronomers
at a convention that the "universe would expand forever,"
but did not mention anything about cosmic acceleration.

Before Riess' team could reach a conclusion on what to do
next, Riess took a break to marry Nancy Schondorf, whom he
met when the two studied together at MIT. The wedding would
end a four-year romantic, if geeky, courtship. The two had
been physically separated when Riess left MIT for Harvard,
so the couple communicated across the Charles River by
blinking flashlights and their apartments' porch lamps.

After the wedding in Connecticut, the two returned to their
Berkeley apartment to pack for their honeymoon at Big Sur.
Riess got on the computer to let the rest of the High-Z
team know what he had found and how big an idea they were
sitting on.

"I thought that, after two days, my wife was going to
divorce me," Riess says. "She thought I was this
workaholic."

The scientist/history buff saved what he wrote that day
— January 12, 1998 — four days after
Perlmutter's announcement: "My God! A guy goes away for his
wedding and when he comes back, the universe is expanding
(forever) and out of control! A guy at the wedding said to
me, 'I read in The New York Times that the universe
will expand forever, did you know that?' I said, 'I'm
familiar with that work.'"

The High-Z team then discussed online what to do with
Riess' results. Filippenko believed that the group should
release a short announcement to the public, but Riess
argued against it. If the team was going to beat
Perlmutter's to the publication punch, it would have to
quickly write what he calls the "War and Peace
version" — an exhaustive explication of their
work. "Let's not waste our energy and reputation waving
half-baked results around," Riess wrote. "Let's band
together to work carefully and efficiently and maybe the
tortoise can catch the hare." Eventually, the group agreed
unanimously. The paper, published in May 1999, beat
Perlmutter's by nine months.

Riess' life didn't really change after the news broke that
his team's research had nixed the entrenched idea that the
universe's expansion was slowing down. His local paper in
Warren offered a down-to-earth headline: "Local Boy Does
Well in Astrophysics." While Science, CNN, and
others set up shop in the cramped hallway outside his
office, he had the chance to hold court as the new
authority on cosmic movement on The Jim Lehrer News
Hour, his dad's favorite show.

He did confide to his mother, though, that he worried he'd
"peaked too early."

Early on, the
two research teams began to stake their claims. A
terrestrial tug of war ensued between the Riess and
Perlmutter teams. Investigating the cosmic tug of war, the
Perlmutter team claimed the first announcement to the
public while Riess argued that his team's detailed and
lengthy publication in the Astronomical Journal was
the definitive word.

Perlmutter says his team showed data in early January 1998
that cosmic acceleration existed. But some on the High-Z
team argued that Perlmutter's findings six months earlier
in favor of deceleration weren't strongly contradicted by
what his team offered that January. "When we're being
impolite, we say they were first, but they were wrong,"
says Kirshner, who has maintained a Web page devoted to
extolling the High-Z team's role in the discovery of dark
energy, and playing down Perlmutter's.

Perlmutter says it's all a matter of semantics. "We thought
'acceleration' was a bad term to use. It would confuse
science and the public if the universe was once
decelerating, but now accelerating. The fact that the
universe would expand forever would make for a good
headline, we thought. I guess we were wrong," he says.

Turner, the University of Chicago professor and a member of
Perlmutter's current team of physicists, wondered at the
time of Perlmutter's announcement why he de-emphasized
cosmic acceleration. "I've given Saul a hard time over
this. His team had the same data and diagrams" as the
High-Z team, he says. "There's been some bad blood over
this, but the majority of people in science say, 'Look,
there were two teams on this at roughly the same time.
Let's not be silly.' There's no precedence in science that
publication is the only way to announce a discovery."

Others say that the intermittent square-off is par for the
cosmic course. "In the last 100 years, it's been hard to
find a major discovery that didn't involve more than one
team," says David Gross, director of the Kavli Institute
for Theoretical Physics at the University of California,
Santa Barbara, and the 2004 Nobel Prize winner in physics.
"It's very normal for scientists to be involved in an
episode like this."

Riess and some others on the High-Z team don't dispute
Perlmutter's connection with the discovery. Perlmutter's
team had found four times as many supernovae by 1998 as the
High-Z team did, and had done a lot of work on software and
optics that aided the discovery. But the High-Z team
wonders if its work has been marginalized by people with an
opposing agenda. At least one major international prize has
been awarded to Perlmutter alone.

"The [Perlmutter team] hadn't significantly considered the
possibility of dust dimming supernovae, but Adam understood
the subtleties of the symptomatics," says Filippenko. "We
did the work to account for other factors and went out on a
limb regarding acceleration."

Some have kept the matter alive. With major scientific
prizes, possibly including the Nobel, and the $1
billion-or-so Joint Dark Energy Mission (JDEM) project, run
by NASA and the Department of Energy, in the wings, the
matter is open for rehashing. "If there are people who want
to make this a point of contention, [the JDEM money] would
generally fan the flames," Perlmutter says.

All of which sometimes distresses the usually good-natured
Riess, those close to him say. "The whole thing perplexes
and angers him," says his mother. "He's very idealistic, so
he can't understand why people make claims that are not
true."

Riess won't point any fingers — he prefers to believe
that major awards will follow the example of the one
international committee that honored all members of both
teams in 2005, or perhaps another that awarded him,
Perlmutter, and Schmidt a major prize in 2006. He believes
that dark energy was co-discovered, and that the two teams
should both share in the glory.

Riess reacts with a smile and a "Good!" when he hears that
Perlmutter feels the same way.

Since coming
to Baltimore in 1999 to start work in a low-level job at
the Space Telescope Science Institute (STSci), where he's
now a senior member of the science staff, Riess has honed
his supernovae studies and undertaken an intense
investigation of the nature of dark energy. But he found a
need to make some adjustments to his thinking. For up to a
year after figuring out dark energy existed, he had to
return to toiling anonymously, reminding himself, "All
science is interesting" — even if it wasn't anywhere
near as exciting as the months that led up to the finding
of cosmic acceleration.

Despite being the guy who cracked a major code of the
universe, his career options were limited back then. What's
more, when a group wanted to hire a speaker on dark energy,
they most often called Kirshner. "I didn't have many
offers," he says. "I was still a junior guy, a largely
unknown quantity. People might have been thinking: 'Is he a
one-hit wonder?' I had to do other projects to stake my
place out in the field."

So Riess began to plumb the depths of the universe, using
the Hubble Space Telescope, which is outfitted with a
camera designed by Holland C. Ford, a physics and astronomy
professor at the Krieger School. Riess calls Hubble "a
supernova search engine." Within two years, he had made a
second momentous discovery: a supernova that dates back 9
billion years — the oldest ever found. Three years
later, Riess found that the universe started speeding up 5
billion years ago. The paper garnered more citations than
any other in astrophysics had for several years.

"These are important clues because dark energy could have
been quite different over time," Riess says. "We could make
a really solid measurement of what the universe was doing.
The smart money says that it's Einstein's cosmological
constant. Our data has supported that."

Although Riess was directed toward supernovae and the
discovery of dark energy with the help of chance, those who
watch him work say he has continued to be in the forefront
of new research because he's incredibly driven — and
because luck is the residue of design.

"I like to say that luck helps the well-prepared," says
Mario Livio, Riess' friend and a theorist at STSci. "This
is very characteristic of Adam. He has a good nose for
things to look at and go after. It's an instinct. He's the
type of observer who takes the care to learn about all the
details surrounding the topic he is interested in. You
can't surprise him."

Riess continues to ask the Hubble for clues. Since coming
to Baltimore, he has used it for 5 percent of its total
working time — more than any other scientist. Such
diligence and attention to detail led to his appointment at
Hopkins in 2005. Now, Riess and his team, with the help of
Hopkins research money, will play a small part in a project
directed by the Air Force to identify and target asteroids
that could smash into the Earth. Riess' interest has little
to do with that part of the mission. Instead, his team will
develop a telescope filter that will make certain
supernovae stand out in the sky. "It'll be like watching a
hockey game on TV in which they light up the puck," he
says.

Riess will also piggyback on Bennett's telescope project,
called ADEPT — assuming it gets the nod from NASA and
the Department of Energy. Bennett has successfully used
another method — measuring cosmic sound waves and
their oscillations dating back to the Big Bang — to
peg the universe's age at 13.7 billion years old and to
bear out the existence of dark energy. There are a small
handful of other techniques in use now as well, but Riess
will continue to study supernovae.

Technology now in the pipeline will provide the next step
toward understanding what dark energy is. As for what that
might be, Riess won't hazard a guess. "I don't really want
to think about it because I don't want to have any
preconceived notions," he says. All he knows is that he'll
spend 10 hours a day working at it, before heading home to
a suburb north of Baltimore to be with Nancy — a Web
designer — and to play with Gabrielle, watch
football, or study his coin collection. He won't be in the
backyard with a telescope. "If we hear anything about a
meteor shower, it's because my mother has called," says
Nancy Riess.

Then, the next day, he'll be back at his computer, sifting
out especially bright spots from a field of intergalactic
ephemera, comforted by the idea that as little as
astrophysicists might know, they know more of it today. All
controversies aside, there may never have been a better
time to practice the science, Riess says. "We're in a
special time right now, a time some call The Era of
Precision Cosmology. This used to be a more speculative
science, but in the last decade we've come up with new ways
to measure the universe," he adds.

Producing good science will remain his passion, he says.
The world of scientific inquiry is a meritocracy, an idea
with which he was raised. He is at home in that world.
"Most of the things we talk about or know of are stories,
or they're belief systems, or they're philosophies. This
thing called science is somehow in the fabric of the
universe. It's the most egalitarian enterprise I know of.
It speaks to everybody in the same way," he says.

"Everybody"
— all 5 billion of us — makes up part of the 4
percent of the universe that isn't dark energy or dark
matter. We have the privilege of being made of atoms. Some
physicists say this makes us irrelevant freaks. Others say
this rareness of position in the universe makes us
special.

This line of thinking, which leads not so neatly from
physics to metaphysics and back, doesn't interest Riess.
That the cosmos has begrudgingly — at least for now,
and as far as we know — given up a secret about its
movements means little more than that there is no meaning
in it.

"I see it as a strong sign of how little regard the
universe has for our existence. It doesn't send us special
clues. It doesn't encode them in matter or energy. We're
like the flea hiding on the back of a dog. We're hanging
out there and the dog doesn't give a hoot about the fact
we're there. The universe isn't malicious. It's not
benevolent," Riess says. But, with a kick from dark energy,
it's accelerating: "It's just not going to stop for us."